This entry is part 6 of 35 in the series Teaching Transparently For the past 5 years, I have had the extraordinary good fortune to work with creative and talented people who value not only the need to create tools that facilitate learning, but tools that also are open, available for sharing, and heck, are(…)
Ask any Apple fan why they love their desktop/laptop/iWhatever and inevitably you’ll hear that Apple Devices Just Work. It’s true that, in Cupertino, hundreds of millions of dollars each year are poured into designing products that are as intuitive and simple as possible, without sacrificing quality. I’m not a member of the Cult of Jobs(…)
Earlier this summer I had the opportunity to spend two days asking “I wonder what THIS button does?” and “Gee, I wonder how I could make THAT happen?” in the (virtual) company of two of my favorite people – the Right Rev Jim Groom, and LLU’s own Barbara Sawhill. Our official task was to re-imagine a fully-online language(…)
It’s been while… You might be wondering whether this blog is dead or if the recession has made its mark on our language centers. Rest assured, we’re just working too hard. Well, it’s Friday and I’m finding a minute to finally write a post. I like web 2.0 tools because they’re interactive, communicative, creative, and…(…)
Summers are great because I have more time to try out new software. With the work on the upcoming language technology boot camp manual (released next Friday! more on that soon), I learned a lot more about inDesign CS3. But that program is a behemoth, sometimes overly complicated. So I am also a big fan(…)
Recently I’ve noticed a trend towards taking web apps and integrated them more fully into the desktop environment so they act more like normal locally-installed software. (Which seems to defeat the purpose of using web apps? But I digress.) This week’s episode is an overview of three major pieces of that trend: the $200 Walmart(…)
Hello again from Denver! Here’s yet -another- list of free apps that I hope you find as interesting as I did … bFree: a freeware program built by UNC-Chapel Hill that allows you to open a Blackboard course’s archive file, to view the documents in a usable file structure, and to extract files individually or(…)
I know, I know – it’s Tuesday and we haven’t had a new episode of Tech-o Tuesday in what seems like forever! Well, Felix and I have been incredibly busy and / or sick, but we’re scheduling the next episodes right now. In the meantime, I finally found an evening to sit down and read(…)
While Gimpshop has been growing on me as of late, rumors of Photoshop Express still have me excited. No official announcement has been made, and we don’t have many details. Early screenshots reveal a GUI that looks as intuitive as iPhoto, but a bit more useful: (photo credit) It seems geared towards the low-to-intermediate user,(…)
This week, Felix and I are joined by special guest Jen – our fabulously talented sound engineer – for a discussion on professional-level audio tools and software. Check below for links to products we mentioned … enjoy! Skype Call Recorder ($14.95) Conference Recorder ($14.95) Quicktime Pro ($29.99) Audio Hijack Pro ($32) Hot Recorder ($14.95) Pamela(…)
Making my way through the dozens of emails I get in a day (GeekyMom you win…I think if I got as many emails as you do I think I would just cry), I found this wee gem from a language textbook publishing company: Dear Professor: We at (name of publisher) are very excited to extend(…)